


Finding Your Fire

by rickywrites



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Coping, Gen, Guilt, Mako & Asami Sato Friendship, Mako & Katara Friendship, Mako Week 2020, Mako is mentally ill, Mako-centric, Minor Korra/Asami Sato, Old Katara (Avatar), Post-Book 3, Sensory Overload, Trauma, a bit of Bolin and Asami at the beginning, mako week, the violence is Mako reliving the fight against Ming-Hua
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:40:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28396299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rickywrites/pseuds/rickywrites
Summary: “I killed someone today.”Katara takes a sip of her tea, holds the mug for a moment, and sets it back down on the coaster. Mako braces for what she has to say.“I had a feeling you did.”
Relationships: Katara and Mako
Comments: 23
Kudos: 61





	Finding Your Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for discussions of death/killing, parental death, and disregard for one’s own well-being. Minor self harm.  
> Kudos and especially comments are much appreciated since I’m pretty new to this!

The only reason Mako knows they’re nearly there is that when his stomach climbs up into his throat as the air ship begins its descent.

He’s spent hours by the window, his eyes glazed over and unfocused. He looks out at the gray clouds rolling by, not really seeing anything. And each time he blinks, all he sees are the blue sparks burned into his eyelids.

Asami, sitting up in the pilot’s seat, flips a switch. The landing gear lowers, sending a deep rumble through the belly of the ship. Mako feels the buzzing in his teeth and through the soles of his shoes, which are still wet. He’s starting to get cold.

The ship creaks against the wind, and Asami turns to the side across from Mako where the rest of their party stands around a stretcher. Korra lays with her hair sprawled out across the pillow Bolin managed to find somewhere on the ship. One of her braids is singed. Being forced into the Avatar state took everything out of her. Tonraq paces in front of the stretcher, and Bolin’s eyes follow him back and forth. Chief Beifong looks like she can’t decide whether or not to stop him. Once Asami sees that Korra’s still soundly asleep despite the noise, she turns back and brings the ship in for a landing.

Katara is already there waiting for them. Her gray hair blows about her face and only settles once Asami kills the engines, which whine and groan until they fall silent. The door opens with a hiss, and immediately Tonraq is out the door, wheeling his daughter’s stretcher down the ramp.

“I’m glad you got her to me as soon as you did.” Katara sounds concerned but level.” “Let’s get her inside. She’s stable, but she could be doing a lot better.”

The rest of the group follows. Tenzin’s foot catches at the top of the ramp and he stumbles. Beifong catches him before he falls, and she and Su each take an arm and support him the rest of the way down. He looks bad, his face pale wherever it isn’t black and blue. Mako presses his lips together tightly into a thin line. I should look like that, he thinks before he can stop himself. He presses his chin into his hands, still sitting alone in the airship. His fingers press against his cheekbones, imagining black eyes like the other man’s. I shouldn’t have gotten off so easy.

“Mako?”

He looks up to see his brother peering back into the ship from halfway up the ramp. “You coming?” Bolin asks, his brows furrowing.

Mako looks up, but his gaze wanders from Bolin’s face, still smudged with dirty and soot, to his sleeves, torn and singed. He’s not sure how his baby brother took out the lava bender. He wouldn’t say. All he’d told the group was that Ghazan had gone down, and he’d made it out. But that was fair, he supposed – Mako hadn’t said a word to the others about how he’d beaten Ming-Hua.

“Um, Mako? Cat got your tongue?”

He shakes himself out of it. “Yeah. Just give me a second.”

Bolin looks from Mako, to the Katara’s home where Korra was wheeled off to, and back.

“It’s fine, Bolin. I’m fine.” He tilts his head towards the exit. “Go be with them.”

Bolin still looks worried, but he must accept that answer because he takes off down the ramp into the snow.

“You can fool him, but I’m not convinced.” He turns and sees that he hadn’t been alone in the ship after all. Asami steps down from the pilot’s seat and gives him a knowing look.

He blinks, confused. Did he do something wrong? He swallows. Does she know what happened in the cave?

“Relax, Mako.” Her voice softens and she hops lightly from the chair to the ground. “I know the look of someone who’s got something big bothering them but doesn’t want to spill it. And I know that you don’t want to make anyone worry any more than they already are.” She walks towards him and looks out to the house as Bolin opens the door and enters in the distance. It looks warm inside. “But you’re not fine.”

Mako opens his mouth to respond, but she’s already adjusting his collar, dusting it off and straightening it for him. “If you can’t talk about it with me, or even your brother, I understand. Just – talk it out with someone.” She gives him a friendly pat on the shoulder. Before he can find his words, she’s down the ramp heading after Bolin.

He thinks of following, but what would he do? Mako tucks his chin, lets his head roll onto one of his shoulders. He would just be crowding that little house. Taking up space, taking up air. He closes his eyes. Best to just stay out here.

* * *

“You’re going to catch a cold.”

Mako blinks awake to see a pair of fur boots in front of his own soaked shoes. He looks up to see Katara standing before him. The old woman’s presence fills the whole cabin. Everyone else is long gone.

He scrambles to his feet. He must’ve dozed off. “Master Katara.” He manages a hasty bow.

She smiles, and well-worn crow’s feet find their way to the corners of her eyes. She holds up a gloved hand, which he misses in his bow. “Mako. How are you?”

“Thank you for seeing us so quickly, and for welcoming us into your home again,” he says to the floor.

“You do know you are welcomed though, right?” she says with a bit of humor in her voice. Mako finally looks up from the floor to see her motherly smile break into a sly grin. “You don’t have to stay up here in the cold.”

“Thank you, Master Katara.”

“You don’t have to call me that.”

“Okay. I’m fine here, ma’am.”

“Just ‘Katara’ is okay. And you’re not fine, Mako.”

Why does everyone keep saying that to him today?

He tries changing the subject. “Is Korra okay?”

“I believe will be. She’ll heal, but it’ll take a long time. A lot of effort.”

“At least she’ll get better.” Mako puts his hands in his pockets, trying to ignore the vague weight he feels in his chest. He’s relieved that Korra is stable. But he should be feeling something more. It feels like his head is just static. Static electricity. Like he left a part of his brain back in that dark cavern.

“I’m so glad you kids are still here.” He looks up at her again. “When Pema let me know you were coming, that you’d gone up against the Red Lotus?” She closes her eyes. “I’ve hoped since Korra was a little girl that they’d never pose a threat to her or any of us again. It must’ve been a tough fight.”

Katara looks down at him like she’s asked a question and is waiting for an answer. Mako looks to the side, wanting to talk about anything else. “How about Tenzin? Is he okay too?”

“He’s okay now. He had a few bruised ribs, black eye.”

That’s good. He looked bad getting out of the ship. “Just bruises for me, too.”

“Tenzin was bruised, but he came out of that fight the same man he was going in. I can’t say the same for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you soaking wet?” Now it’s her turn to answer a question with another question.

Mako pauses, thinks carefully about how much to say. “I fought the waterbender. Ming-Hua, I think her name was.” He tries to sound casual, but his voice breaks a bit on the last word. He hopes she didn’t notice and looks across to the other side of the ship.

“I know that, Mako.” Katara moves to take a seat next to him. He scoots down the bench to give her room, bumping his back against the hull. She sighs as she sits down. “Everyone’s been talking about where they were during the fight.” She looks over to him. “How they got away.”

He can feel her gaze burning into the side of his temple. He bites his lip.

“Mako, did you say ‘was’?”

The static in his ears rises like someone suddenly twisted the volume up. He can almost smell burning.

“I –” His voice wobbles. He clears his throat as his eyes well up against his will. He wasn’t expecting to hear the sound that came out of his mouth just now. Katara places a hand gingerly on his knee.

“Why are you still drenched when you can warm yourself up in an instant?”

When Katara says that, it’s like the world rushes back to him and he can actually feel how cold he is for the first time. He shudders, and the motion knocks a few tears loose from his eyes.

She takes her hand from his knee, and Mako braces for more questions. But she simply extends her arms towards him, her palms almost touching his shirt. She pulls them back toward herself, and the moisture is plucked from his clothes and hair to form a wobbling sphere of water that hovers between the two of them.

“Your fire’s gone out.” He blinks. He hadn’t connected the battle to how he felt now, but that was because he’d done his best to keep any thoughts about what happened out of his mind. It wasn’t even a choice he made. It was instinct to push it down.

“You still look cold, Mako. Let’s get you moving. Where do you go to think?”

A less loaded question, at least. “I don’t know. I usually just walk around, I guess.”

Katara stands and offers him an arm. “Let’s walk, then.”

* * *

The snow crunches beneath their feet as the two of them make their way through the darkened village. A few lamp posts hold flames that burn orange against the deep blue of the night, but they are the only people out to see them.

Mako concentrates on the rhythmic crunch under his boots, a steady drum beat. It’s satisfying, especially since Mako has only seen snow a few times in his life. He focuses on this rather than everything else he should be thinking about now.

“What does your bending mean to you, Mako?” Katara interrupts their meditative silence.

He isn’t sure how to answer. “Well, it put food on the table. Pro-bending got us off the street, out of the worst kinds of trouble and into the kind of trouble that plays out in the ring instead. We had to do something to eat after our parents passed.”

Katara takes in his grief. “I’m sorry, Mako.”

“It was a firebender,” he says jaggedly. “A firebending mugger did it. Took me years to make a single flame after that.”

“That must’ve been hard,” she murmurs empathetically.

“I know we’re not the only ones who’ve lost people,” he rushes to explain. He doesn’t like it when people take pity on him. “I know you lost your mother, too.” Katara is a bit taken aback, and he knows immediately that he shouldn’t have said it like that. “I’m sorry, I didn’t to overstep –”

“I know you didn’t mean it that way.” She takes a deep breath. “It changes your world to lose a parent, but it changes everything about you to lose them so young. I’m sure you know about that.”

Her pace slows, and when she falls behind enough for him to notice Mako stops until she catches up to him. She looks directly into his eyes as she walks slowly to him. “I had to become something of a parent myself. Not to overstep, but – ” She gives him a meaningful look and she stops just a few feet in front of him. “I have a feeling you know something about that as well.”

“You’re – right.” Mako takes a step back before he can stop himself. “I had to be there for Bolin. There wasn’t anyone else left in the world to do that for him.” He doesn’t talk about this with anyone, not even his brother. And here he is telling this woman who he’s known about his whole life but has only had a few surface-level conversations with before.

“You ended up raising him along with yourself,” Katara volunteers. He nods. “What did you two do all those years?”

“Steal, mostly.” He’s ashamed, but he doesn’t see any judgment in her eyes. “We did what we had to do to get by. The pro-bending, once we were old enough.” He rubs the back of his neck and looks up to the cloudy night sky. “Well, once we were old enough to look like we were old enough.

“And that’s when you started bending again?” She asks less to know the answer and more to help him along. Mako nods again. They naturally start walking again. “Bolin was only 13 when we had our first match.” He still remembers his baby-faced brother stepping up into the ring for the first time, his too-big helmet falling crooked to one side.

“So it wasn’t a choice you got to make, then.” Mako’s thoughts have been mostly about Bolin, but Katara puts the focus back on himself. He’s a bit surprised.

“How do you mean, ma’am?” he asks. She gives him a look. “I mean, Katara.”

“It sounds like your first big wound never quite healed, and now you’ve got another one on top of it.” Katara tells him as she comes to a stop.

Mako’s feet start to drag in the snow until he comes to a stunned halt. Does she know what happened today?

“I can’t read your mind, but I know you had to have done something to get yourself out of that fight.” Katara calls from behind him. “And I can see the way it weighs on you now.”

He can’t bring himself to turn around. He presses his eyes shut, but all he sees is electric blue sparks on black and his nose floods with the smell of burnt hair –

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. But I’m here to listen if you’d like to tell someone who’ll understand.” She turns back to her house, the only one still lit in the village. A little light next to the airship in the distance.

“I’ve already done something I didn’t want to do,” he says in a low whisper. He’s not sure if she can even hear him, if she’s still walking. But she stops at the sound of his voice. “I don’t think you can understand.”

“I might not understand everything about you. No one can do that. But I do know what it’s like to feel like your bending isn’t your own.”

Mako turns to face her as she does the same. Something about that struck a nerve deep inside him, and he wants to hear more even though the feeling scares him.

“I felt for the longest time like I was only there to protect my brother,” Katara goes on. “The same way our mother protected us. And he seemed to think that it was his job to step into our father’s role. Couldn’t blame him, being the oldest boy to be too young for the war.” She sighs deeply. “I suppose no one is too young for war after all. Or everyone is.”

She sits for a long time with her words. Mako grasps for something to say to break the silence when she continues. “So I did what I could. Taught myself to use the water to protect us. To get us food. To fight.”

Mako finds himself nodding along as she speaks. He’s not sure how any of this is related to what happened today, but her voice is one that compels you to really stop and listen.

“But something changed when I started bending for myself.” She stops and lifts her arms out gracefully to either side like she’s about to take flight. In an instant, the snow around them stops falling. As far as he can see, not a single snowflake falls to the ground. “It was like taking something back that’d been mine all along.”

One snowflake hangs delicately in the air in front of Mako’s nose as if it was frozen in time. He reaches out to touch it, and it melts onto his fingertip. He looks from his finger, to the landscape of suspended snow, to Katara. What she’s showing him is beautiful. But something in him hardens.

“I’ll never leave my brother behind.”

“That isn’t what I’m telling you to do, Mako. I’m not telling you to do anything at all.” She turns and walks back the way they came. “Come back with me. I’ll fix us something warm to drink.”

* * *

Katara gestures to a modest round table in her living room. “Have a seat. Be careful not to wake the others. Some folks are at Tonraq and Senna’s, but they didn’t quite have enough room.”

Mako knocks the snow from his boots on the mat by the front door, removes them, and steps in. Her house smells like pine sap and spices. He breathes it in deep, and as he exhales he realizes he’s been holding his breath for a while.

They were mostly quiet on the walk back. That should’ve come as a relief, but instead it made Mako nervous.

Now, Katara goes about like it’s just another night for her. She reaches up into the top cabinet in her kitchen and grabs two coasters. They have matching otter penguin designs, one blue and one red.

She lights one of her stovetop burners, and the clicking before the ignition makes Mako’s skin crawl. He braces for the flame, but as soon as it flares up from the burner she has the pot on and waits for it to boil.

“Here you are.” She hands him the first mug. Its smooth, made of worn clay.

Mako blows on his tea, closing his eyes to shield them from the steam. Chamomile. Katara pours a second mug.

“You don’t need to share anything you aren’t ready to.” She sets her own tea down on the blue coaster and sits across from him. “But I would like to ask what happened to you earlier.”

Mako’s eyes open slowly, like he’s waking from a long nap. Hot steam fills his vision. It’s uncomfortable, but it beats trying to make eye contact after that.

“It’s less what happened to me,” he answers before he can stop himself, “and more what I did.”

Katara doesn’t seem phased by his tone. “That’s okay, then. What did you do today?”

She sounds like she could be asking about the weather, or the latest rankings in the pro-bending championships. She picks up her mug.

Mako can’t help but let out a curt laugh. Emotionless, because letting himself feel while he says it out loud for the first time would be like letting himself stand at the edge of a crumbling cliff high above the shore.

“I killed someone today.”

Katara takes a sip of her tea, holds the mug for a moment, and sets it back down on the coaster. Mako braces for what she has to say.

“I had a feeling you did.”

He looks across the table to her, confused. The look in her eyes says she wants to hear more. Not in a curious or prying way – the way a good friend wants to know what happened when you say you had a bad day. And this had been the worst day of his life. So he keeps talking.

“I followed Ming-Hua through the cave after I split from Bolin. She tripped on some crystal sticking up from the ground – whole place was covered in the green stuff – and she fell down into a corner. I thought I could just keep her there and leave it at that. She had no escape, no water. But she ran and jumped down this impossible crack in the ground, and I followed, and before I knew it I was standing ankle-deep in cave water.”

Katara nods.

“I lit a fire and looked for her. She didn’t keep me waiting long. And when I saw her, it was like something out of one of those horror movers. She must’ve been four, five feet off the ground, and instead of standing on her feet she just had these water tentacles like a squid shark. It was all instinct after that. I couldn’t hold a flame up or anything, I just turned and ran as fast as I could. She came at me with everything. There was nothing I could do. So I did the only thing I could think of.”

He looks to her again, waiting for her to cut him off, to demand that he leave the house. But she just sits there with her tea.

“I hopped up on some stalagmites, had a foot on each and one arm on another. All I could see was the water under me, and it was all drawing back into her like the tide. And so I…”

He trails off.

Katara stands, comes around the table, and puts a hand on his shoulder.

“You did what you had to do.”

“I shot lightning straight down. All I could hear was her screaming, and all I could smell was her hair burning, and when I could finally look I could see the whites all the way around her eyes – ”

Mako doesn’t know when he started shaking, but now it’s uncontrollable. His hands spasm like he’s been shocked. He looks down at them as they jitter in his lap.

“Mako.”

“— and when I came down and saw her on the other side of the cave, she just looked like a person. Not like the monster that was coming after me.”

“Mako – ”

“I killed somebody.” Now that he’s finally said it out loud, it feels like he needs to say it more. It feels like there’s a weight on his chest pushing the air out of him as he speaks. “I killed somebody, and the worst thing is that when she fell to the ground the first thing I felt was relief. Because it meant I’d make it out to find Bolin. To see my friends again.” The words come spilling from his mouth. He gasps “But I’m not the only one who has people who care about them. My father never spoke to his parents again because he was killed before he could. What if she had someone who was waiting for her?”

His eyes slam shut violently, and again the blue bolts of lightning crowds his vision. Arcs of electricity sloughing off of his hand. He can see it happening like he’s back there in the cave, the sparks spreading from his fingertips in slow motion.

Mako snaps his eyes open to come back to the present, but when he looks down he doesn’t see his own hands. He sees hands that are rough, older than his. Thin, with gnarled veins sprawled across bone. The hands of the man who killed his parents.

“Slow down. You’re spiraling.”

“There was nothing I could do,” he sobs.

Katara reaches for her tea again and gestures for Mako to take his drink as well. He blinks, and his hands are his own again for now.

“Sorry,” he says after a while. He clears his throat, shakes his head a little. A bit of snow comes loose from his hair, and a speck of it falls into his mug and loses its form to the warm tea in an instant.

“Your body and what you can do with it, including your bending, is yours and yours alone.” She stirs her tea thoughtfully with a spoon as she speaks. “It’s yours to give to others if you choose, but it is never theirs to take.”

“You mentioned something like that earlier, but honestly, I didn’t follow. I was just happy to listen to someone talk so I wouldn’t have to for a while.”

“You’ve got a big heart, Mako.” Katara says. He doesn’t feel like it. “And you did what you had to with your bending protect the people you love again. To see them again. You didn’t choose that fight; it happened to you. You just did what needed to be done once you were there.”

That actually does ease the ache in his chest a bit. But then his mind does the thing it does best: find ways to hurt itself. “But I have to be able to bend again, or they’ll take me off the force. Then Bolin and I will have to get back in the ring, and I don’t want that for him, plus I won’t be any use there either without my fire. Which puts us back on the street, except this time I won’t be able to protect him – ”

She takes his shaking hands in her steady ones. “That will all come later. Your fire hasn’t gone out, Mako. I can still see it there in your eyes.”

Mako stills when she says this. Can she really?

“I think you’ve just lost it for now. But it’s still in there. Take all the time you need. It will come back to you when you’re ready. But don’t let anything that happens to you take that part of yourself away from you. Can you promise me that?”

He’s at a loss for words. He looks up at her and nods. Her eyes crinkle around the edges as she smiles. And after a moment, he smiles back, hesitantly, waveringly. He goes to take another sip of his tea and find that it’s gone cold. Katara notices his expression change, though he does his best to hide it.

“I can make a fresh pot for us if you’d like. Send you off to bed with something warm.”

Mako thinks about it. Then, he raises his other hand to the mug and closes his eyes. He rubs his thumbs in circles on the clay, grounding himself with the repetitive motion. Finding the part of himself that burns, not out of violence or hatred, but simply because it burns. It’s just the way he is. It’s flickering there inside him, and he feels that instead of the fear of himself that today has brought him.

When he opens his eyes, steam is curling up from the mug and the smell of chamomile tea fills the air.

“I’m proud of you, Mako.”

He can’t think of what to say to thank her, so instead he holds out his hand. “Let me do yours, too. It’s the least I can do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you relate at all to Mako's guilt, or Katara's grief, or either of their pain, you are beautiful and you deserve the world. You are your own person, and that's a person worth living for. <3


End file.
